I only realized then that she had lost a grandchild. Her one grandchild. How bizarre that someone so far away as my mother then seemed, in this large, sunny house in Mexico, with its terra- cotta floors, arranged flowers, and paintings in gilded frames, so far away from my son’s ashes, from the bed from which he never woke up, could feel his loss. Santiago was so mine, I could not fathom her feeling him gone.
